Wastewater that contains one or both of ammonia and ammonium (“ammonia-containing water”) emits offensive smells and promotes eutrophication, which is fatal to aquatic life. Ammonia-containing water is therefore increasingly being treated before being discharged into the environment. Well-developed processes comprising biological processes, air stripping, resin-based ion exchange, and breakpoint chlorination have been applied to treating ammonia-containing water. While these processes may be suitable for certain applications, they can be non-ideal for other applications as they typically suffer from one or both of relatively low processing efficiencies and relatively high processing costs. Biological processes, for example, typically can efficiently remove ammonia and/or ammonium from ammonia-containing water, but they are not flexible for changing ammonia loadings, their performance is heavily impacted by environmental temperature, and process upsets can kill the organisms driving the biological processes, requiring long downtime to rectify. Air stripping processes release ammonia into the air, creating air pollution; if the ammonia is recaptured, a large amount of base solution must be consumed. Resin-based ion exchange processes require regenerating by chemical means or disposing of ion-exchange resins, which is expensive for large-scale continuous wastewater treatment. Breakpoint chlorination processes are typically only economical when the ammonia and/or ammonium content in water is less than 10 ppm; for higher concentrations, the costs of adding large quantities of chlorine and of removing leftover chlorine before water discharge inhibit large-scale utilization of those processes. In addition, saline waters with varying ammonia loads are being encountered in industry.